


Stories

by sahiya



Category: Parks and Recreation, The West Wing
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Probably not as a cracky as it should be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-16
Updated: 2013-07-16
Packaged: 2017-12-20 09:22:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/885610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sahiya/pseuds/sahiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Seaborn never expected to end up in a place like Pawnee, Indiana.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stories

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toldthestars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toldthestars/gifts).



> Written for my friend **toldthestars** on the occasion of her birthday.

Sam Seaborn never expected to end up in a place like Pawnee, Indiana. Seaborns didn’t live in Pawnees. They lived in LA’s or New Yorks or DC’s, places you could find on a map without a magnifying glass, where decisions were made and there was a decent metropolitan opera. Seaborns were attorneys and surgeons and highly placed government officials; they didn’t end up working for a state government (and in the Midwest, too) auditing local budgets.

But then again, Seaborns also generally didn’t have nervous breakdowns and have to quit their jobs writing for the President of the United States. 

Sam hadn’t felt much like a Seaborn when he’d come out the other side of his _episode_ , as his mother liked to call it. He wasn’t sure who he was, but he was pretty sure Sam Seaborn, graduate of Princeton and White House Communications Director, wasn’t it. He gave up sugar and white flour, bought his first pair of yoga pants, and dove down the rabbit hole of vitamin supplements and obsessive jogging.

For a while it seemed to work. Endorphins were _amazing_ \- almost better than antidepressants. But every time he applied for a job, the interviewer inevitably asked him about his time at the White House. He supposed he couldn’t blame them; it wasn’t like _White House Communications Director_ wasn’t stamped across the top of his résumé, right alongside his name. But the truth was that the spectacular crash and burn of his political ambitions was the very last thing Sam wanted to talk about - not only in job interviews, but _ever._

Finally, one day it hit him: maybe there was a way he wouldn’t have to. 

It involved giving up everything, but he’d already done that anyway. He moved to Indianapolis, a place he’d previously only seen out the window of a campaign bus, changed his name to something whitebread and unremarkable, and dreamed up a background to go along with it. Chris Traeger had a degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was smart but not too smart, and he didn’t care where he lived. In fact, Chris was blissfully happy living anywhere. Best of all, he had never worked as a speechwriter. 

An old friend of his dad’s got him the job auditing city budgets in Indiana. There were a handful of people at the state house who knew who he really was: his boss, his boss’s boss, and maybe a couple of higher-ups Sam - _Chris_ \- didn’t know personally. Chris Traeger’s background was pretty flimsy if someone ever decided to poke at it too hard, but Sam Seaborn was more than qualified for Chris Traeger’s job, and whoever background checked the state auditor? 

Ben knew. Chris didn’t know if Ben had figured it out or if their boss had told him, but it didn’t matter. Ben knew, and Chris knew he knew, and they never talked about it. 

It shouldn’t have been an issue. Outside of Washington, the White House Communications Director wasn’t a very recognizable face, and Chris didn’t expect anyone to ever recognize him as _that guy who worked for the president for a while._ Most of his jobs were in small Indiana towns, where people read the local paper and not _The Wall Street Journal_ or _The New York Times_. He didn’t think it would ever be a problem.

He hadn’t counted on Leslie Knope. 

He saw her do a double take at him the first day he walked into the Pawnee Parks Department. Her eyes narrowed and he broke out in a cold sweat. _Damn it._ Fortunately he and Ben had this down to a science by now; he did his usual first day spiel to pump them up and make them feel good about themselves and their department - Chris Traeger was _very_ good at pumping people up - then split while Ben gave them the bad news. 

He pushed himself an extra three miles that day at lunch, but it didn’t matter. Nothing could make him look less like Sam Seaborn, and the next time Leslie Knope marched into his office ranting about something having to do with a children’s concert, he braced himself. But as luck would have it, righteous rage was a good distraction. Chris did chin-ups in the corner while Ben disappointed Leslie, and she barely spared him a glance on her way out the door. 

It could be anything, he told himself. People looked at him strangely all the time. It was the combination of ruthless positivity, an absurd amount of eye contact, and his (if he did say so himself) boyish good looks. People had looked at Sam for the same reasons, though maybe not quite as often. It could be anything. 

It could be, but it wasn’t. 

For someone who had all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop when it came to political maneuvering, Leslie Knope turned out be surprisingly perceptive in other areas. She didn’t say anything in front of Ben or Ann or Ron. She waited until Chris was helping her carry AV equipment to her car after the Freddy Spaghetti concert, and then she said, “So, Chris, has anyone ever told you you look a _lot_ like Sam Seaborn?”

Even though he’d been half-expecting it for days now, Chris almost dropped the speakers he was carrying. “Sorry, who?” he said, as blankly as possible.

“Sam Seaborn,” Leslie said. “He was this _amazing_ speechwriter who worked for Bartlet in his first term. I used to listen to Bartlet’s speeches all the time in college, and I could always tell when Seaborn had written it. His writing had this rhythm to it, it was almost more like poetry. Anyway,” she added after a moment, “he worked for Santos, too, for a while, and then he just fell off the face of the planet. No idea what happened to him. There was all sorts of speculation online, but nothing was ever confirmed. His Wikipedia entry hasn’t been updated in, like, five years.”

“Huh,” Chris said, wishing he didn’t still feel a burn of pride at her words. He _had_ been good. Maybe even better than Toby on his good days (no, actually, he _knew_ he’d been better than Toby on his good days). “And you think I look like him?”

“You could be his brother,” she said. “No, his twin. His long lost twin, separated at birth. Any relation? Not that I’m hoping for an introduction or anything,” she added, with a nervous laugh that told Chris that she was hoping for exactly that.

“Nope, afraid not,” Chris said. “Sorry. Hey, can you get the rest of this? I’d like to do a quick 10k before dinner.”

“Uh, yeah,” Leslie said. “Sure, if you -”

But Chris was already gone.

***

He knew that wouldn’t be the end of it. Leslie Knope was a bulldog. She wasn’t going to let the city budget crisis stop her, and she wasn’t going to let this go, either. It made Chris nervous. He upped his vitamin B intake and emailed Josh. 

_I think someone here knows. There’s this deputy director in the Parks Department. She’s a politics junkie and I think she’s got me made._

Josh - who was in New York trying to convince the senior state senator to run for president in the next election - wrote back within twelve hours.

_Would that really be such a bad thing? You’ve been hiding for long enough. Stop messing around in the flyover zone and come work with me in NYC._

Chris didn’t reply. He didn’t know why he kept writing to Josh. He didn’t get that this wasn’t “the flyover zone” for Chris, it was his home now. He had a condo in Indianapolis. He didn’t have a lot of friends, but he liked it here. 

But maybe, he thought, just _maybe_ Josh was a little bit right. Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible if someone knew. 

He got a brief reprieve while the city government was suspended over the summer. But in September, when the suspension was lifted and everyone was back, the first thing Leslie did was march into his office with a stack of color-coded binders full of ideas for the Park Department under one arm and a black and white dossier labeled _The Seaborn-Traeger Conundrum_ under the other.

“Leslie Knope!” he exclaimed with the broadest, Traegeriest smile he could muster. 

“First of all, I need these funded,” she said, dropping the binders on his desk. “Secondly, I know your secret. You _are_ Sam Seaborn.”

Chris tried to laugh. “You’re hilarious,” he told her. 

“And _you_ didn’t exist before you took the state auditor’s job three years ago,” Leslie replied. “I had all summer to look into this, Chris - or should I say _Sam_? Your résumé claims that you graduated magna cum laude from the University of Illinois, but there aren’t any records of a Chris Traeger graduating that year or five years in either direction. You have a bunch of other qualifications listed, too, and those are just as fake. So. Care to tell me the truth or shall I call your boss in Indianapolis?”

Chris rubbed a hand over his face. It was exhausting, sometimes, being Chris Traeger. Though never as bad as being Sam Seaborn had been. “Close the door, Leslie, please.”

“HA!” she said. “I knew it!”

“ _Door_ ,” Chris repeated. “Please.”

Leslie shut the door. “I can’t believe it,” she said, dropping into the chair in front of Chris’s desk. “You’re _Sam Seaborn_. What are you doing here? Wait,” she said, before Chris could reply, “is this some sort of secret mission from the president? Do communications directors _have_ secret missions?”

“No,” Chris said. “No secret mission.” He quashed the urge to reach for a multivitamin. There was no known cure for what Ben called the Leslie Knope cluster headache, which Chris could feel building behind his right eye. 

“So what are you doing here?” Leslie asked. 

“I’m . . .” _Hiding._ Chris gritted his teeth. “Have you ever wanted to be someone else?” he asked. “Someone totally different?” 

Leslie frowned. “Not really,” she said. “I mean, I want to be Hillary Clinton, minus the cheating husband, but I guess that’s not what you’re talking about.”

“Not really.” Chris sighed. “Look, it’s a long story. I don’t really want to get into it. Could you just . . . not tell anyone?”

Leslie eyed him narrowly. “Does Ben know?”

“Yes,” Chris said, “Ben knows.”

“Well, all right then,” Leslie said, as though that settled the matter. “I won’t tell anyone that we have a political celebrity in our midst - on one condition.”

Chris winced. “What’s that?”

“That you let me take you out for a beer and you tell me one really good story about working with President Bartlet.”

Chris managed a smile. “Okay,” he said. “One really good story.”

That should’ve been that. Except that Leslie Knope was Leslie Knope, and of course it wasn’t just one really good story. She got him to tell three that first night: about the night he had to go to Connecticut with Toby to bail Justice Mendoza out of jail, about the handful of times he staffed the president, about the time he got his ass kicked on national TV by Ainsley Hayes. She listened raptly and asked interesting questions, and by the end of the evening Chris realized something. 

They were really good stories.

That night, after Chris got home, he couldn’t sleep. He thought about going for a night run, but he didn’t think it’d help. He took some melatonin, brewed a cup of chamomile tea, and laid down again for a while. 

Then he got up and turned on his computer. 

_Celestial Navigation_ , he typed, then bolded it. 

_Occasionally something happens when you work at the White House that’s too ludicrous to be believed. In this case, it was a perfect storm of events: the deputy director of Housing and Urban Development losing her temper with a member of Congress (who, to be fair, deserved it), a press secretary who had just had an emergency root canal, and Josh Lyman being Josh Lyman . . ._

The words felt good. Chris hadn’t felt like putting pen to paper in years, but _the words felt good_. When he finally went back to bed, long after his melatonin should’ve kicked in, he slept easily and well. 

After that, it became a habit. Every couple of weeks until Chris moved back to Indianapolis, and then again after he moved back to Pawnee to take the city manager job, he and Leslie would go out after work. Leslie would buy him a beer, and he’d tell her a story or two or three. Then he’d go home and write them down. By the time he’d been in Pawnee a year, he had a stack of stories - chapters, he realized, when he was honest with himself. He had no idea what he was going to do with them, but he had them. 

“What do you and Leslie talk about when you go for a beer?” Ben asked him one day, when Leslie stuck her head in to tell him she’d be fifteen minutes late that evening. 

Chris was hanging upside down from his doorway. He looked up at Ben and said, “Old times.”

“Old times?” Ben repeated with a frown. Chris raised (or lowered, depending on your perspective) his eyebrows at Ben. “ _Oh._ Old times. Really?”

“Yes. Help me dismount?” 

Ben sighed but helped Chris dismount. “I didn’t realize Leslie knew about . . . old times.”

“Oh, she figured it out by the end of last summer.”

Ben’s lips twitched. “Of course she did.”

“Listen,” Chris said, “why don’t you come with us tonight? We usually have a beer and I tell a couple of stories.”

“Okay,” Ben said. “Sure. I just - I didn’t think you wanted to talk about any of that stuff.”

“I don’t,” Chris said. “I mean, I didn’t. But you know how Leslie is.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “I do. Do you want me to get her to lay off?”

“Nah,” Chris said, shaking his head. “It’s fine.”

And it _was_ fine, he realized. Somewhere along the way these evenings with Leslie Knope had gone from being a chore to being something he looked forward to, sitting down every couple of weeks and remembering what it had been like. Mostly it hadn’t been like those days toward the end, which to be honest he barely remembered anyway. Most of it had been good. _Really_ good, even. 

It was good to talk to Ben about it, too. Chris liked Leslie, but Ben had been his first real friend after he walked away from everything, and it was good to finally be honest with him. Probably they’d been not-talking about it for longer than was healthy, but Ben would’ve never brought it up on his own and Chris hadn’t known he wanted to. Ben seemed to enjoy the stories just as much as Leslie, and after she left the two of them stayed. Ben ordered another round and the two of them sat, enjoying the warm Pawnee summer’s evening.

“So why’d you give it up?” Ben asked, after a long silence.

Chris winced. Maybe that was why he’d never talked about any of this with Ben. Leslie never asked the hard questions. Chris didn’t know if she just wasn’t interested or if she knew he wouldn’t answer, but they never went anywhere near his last six months with the Santos administration. But Ben _was_ interested, and he was watching Chris closely. 

“I sort of . . . lost it,” Chris said. “It stopped being fun, and after that it was just stress, stress, and more stress.”

Ben raised an eyebrow at him. “You? Lost it?”

Chris shrugged. “I hadn’t found meditation yet. Or vitamins.”

“Huh,” Ben said, blinking. “So you decided auditing city budgets in Indiana would be more fun?”

“Hey, we’ve had some fun,” Chris pointed out. “Haven’t we?”

“I guess so,” Ben said. “More fun than I had on my own anyway.”

Chris didn’t doubt that. He knew about the death threats. “Yeah, me too.”

“Do you think you’ll ever go back?”

Chris took a long draught from his beer, but in the end he shook his head. No, he wouldn’t go back. He was Chris Traeger now. Sam Seaborn didn’t belong anywhere near Pawnee, Indiana - no more than Chris Traeger belonged in Washington.

But it was good to remember. That night, Chris went home and paged slowly through the stories he’d collected since he’d arrived in Pawnee and Leslie had figured him out. Some were funny and some were sad and some were both. All of them were stories worth telling; all of them were stories it might even be worth signing Sam Seaborn’s name to. 

Someday. When he was ready.

_Fin._


End file.
